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Adele M. Stan

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Does anybody in Hillary Clinton 's campaign care about the future of the Democratic Party? That's what I'd like to know. I spent yesterday arguing that while Geraldine Ferraro 's comments about the role Barack Obama 's race played in his propulsion into the presidential race may have some grounding in fact (his personal story providing a powerful campaign narrative), they were grossly unhelpful. After Team Obama responded, condemning the remarks as an attempt to reduce the candidate to little more than his race -- a charge also grounded in fact -- you would think Ferraro might graciously step back from her original remarks, say she hadn't meant them the way they came out, or whatever. But, no, instead she made it clear that she meant every word exactly as it was heard, with every drop of racial resentment the consumer may have tasted. Here's what she told the New York Times : “Every time that campaign is upset about something, they call it racist,” she said. “I will not be...

As a feminist who remembers the thrill of seeing Geraldine Ferraro take the stage at the 1984 Democratic National Convention as the party's vice presidential nominee, I can't tell you just how depressing I find the remarks she made about Barack Obama , blogged here by Dana . Whatever her shortcomings, Ferraro was a culture hero to me. She kept her birth name, a fact that highlighted the sexism of the New York Times , which, in its refusal to use the term "Ms." insisted on calling her "Mrs. Ferraro," even though her husband was "Mr. Zaccaro ." ("Mrs. Ferraro is my mother," Geraldine Ferraro famously said.) She stood up to the Catholic church, refusing to yield on women's reproductive rights, and took the backlash, which came when John O'Connor , the cardinal archbishop of New York, called on Catholics not to vote for her. (Funny, Teddy Kennedy never faced that kind of opposition from the church.) But now she has revived the resentment argument against Obama, pitting race against gender...

The inimitable Maureen Dowd , in yesterday's column , churned up her customary blend of insight and meanness to send that message to Barack Obama , with whose campaign she has been traveling. Obama sounded whiny after his losses, chastising reporters on his plane for asking him hard questions about Goolsbee and Antonin Rezko. Privately, his people conceded that he hadn’t been as fierce about winning as Hillary, once more playing rope-a-dope. He’s now learned what Hillary learned in Iowa: You can’t cruise to victory on a coronation strategy. While Dowd has driven me nuts throughout this campaign with some of her over-the-top (and sometimes sexist) pronouncements about Hillary Clinton (proof of Hillary's monstrous fecklessness: she gave Socks the cat to Betty Currie ), she has a point about Obama's high-road strategy. Problem is, he really can't play the way Clinton does and maintain the rationale for his campaign, which is all about a "new kind of politics." He's in a tricky spot...

An interesting fact about Hillary Clinton 's win in Ohio is that, according to MSNBC's Nora O'Donnell , for the first time in any of these primaries, a substantial majority of white men (59 percent) voted for her. Likely the Clinton campaign's deft play of the NAFTA issue -- especially news of the Obama campaign's contacts with the Canadian consulate -- had some bearing on that number. But a troubling number arose in MSNBC Ohio exit polls : When asked if, "In deciding your vote, was the race of the candidate important?", 59 percent of Clinton's voters who said "yes" voted for Clinton . With Clinton having won 64 percent of the white vote overall, according to MSNBC, it's hard not to wince at that number. Seems as if announcements of the dawning of a post-racial society have been a bit premature. If we can remain mindful, this election stands to offer great lessons for us as a people, and what constitutes "good difference" and "bad difference" in our collective mindset. For instance,...

As counterpoint to an essay by anti-feminist woman who claims women to be intellectually inferior to men, editors of yesterday's Washington Post Outlook section ran a piece by a self-described feminist who describes women voters as fickle. Wow. I feel so much better. The essay by Charlotte Allen of the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum, offered this : Women swoon (particularly at Barack Obama rallies), have more automobile accidents, and can't do math. The ostensible balance on the page was provided by Linda Hirshman , who asserted that Hillary Clinton 's campaign is suffering because of the migration of "fickle" white women voters, particularly women from the "educated classes" (composed of women with college degrees) to Barack Obama 's camp. According to Hirshman, this has to do with our seduction by Michelle Obama 's Jimmy Choo shoes. That and the fact that we care little or nothing for the plight of the working-class woman. Hirshman, who graduated from Cornell, first fails...